Ed Ruscha. Custom-Built Intrigue: Drawings 1974–1984

About

Many of these historical gems have been brought together thanks to generous loans from private and institutional collections.

Throughout decades of formal experimentation, Ruscha has explored the role of language in painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, and bookmaking through a singular, sometimes oblique use of words.  From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, he honed his distinctive drawing practice to create some of the most compelling works of his career. The text drawings from this period, exquisitely rendered in pastel, dry pigment, gunpowder, and various edible substances, from spinach to Pepto-Bismol, bridge the spirited Pop art for which Ruscha first gained renown with the cerebral Conceptualism to which his work was essential.

The exhibition features a decade of drawings (1974–1984) and one work on paper from 1986, in which Ruscha reintroduces the element of illusionary space—a shift to another stage of his drawing practice.

Drawing has long been considered the most direct process by which thought is transferred into image, but Ruscha almost completely conceptualizes his images prior to making them. Utilizing graphic techniques such as reverse-stenciling and unconventional tools such as cotton puffs and Q-Tips, he often renders any trace of his own hand virtually undetectable, focusing instead on the visual punch of the composition. Selectively trawling words and phrases from the American vernacular, with little regard to their prescribed meaning or intention, Ruscha subverts the symbolic system of language altogether. Words and phrases severed from specific time, location, or context resonate with just as much vitality and pathos as when the drawings were created.

Custom-Built Intrigue (1981) combines vibrant colors and dynamic lingo with a flare of California cool, fusing the mythic cars of Los Angeles hot-rod culture (custom-built) with the complex plots of the silver screen (intrigue). In this drawing, Ruscha additionally describes his own creative process of combining words as reusable parts, producing a complex and enigmatic composite of meanings. In two drawings from 1976, Find Contact Lens at Bottom of Swimming Pool and Thick Blocks of Musical Fudge, richly sensorial words emerge from almost palpable hues. Find Contact Lens at Bottom of Swimming Pool evocatively describes a nearly impossible task: the dappled aquamarine surface conjures sunlight striking water, beneath which the missing contact lens supposedly lurks. Thick Blocks of Musical Fudge exemplifies Ruscha’s formal and linguistic mastery, whereby sound and taste are conflated in a sumptuous synesthetic experience. The words coax the textures and smells of rich confectionery out of the deep brown pastel ground. He Enjoys the Co. of Women is classic Ruscha; its droll use of colloquial and abbreviated language creates an open narrative with an economy of means.

Ruscha's protean drawings have a renewed potency in an era when talking heads, internet memes, and 140-character tweets corrode and constrict social channels of imagination, communication, and interpretation.

A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Lisa Turvey, Editor of the Ed Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper, will be published to accompany the exhibition.